Hey folks, I've been playing with SDL a bit. Managed to get it to play 
video via mplayer at 1024x768x16 with vesafb. I haven't made any formal 
patches yet, but here's some stuff to play with:

Package for i386 -current:
   http://www.invisible.ca/~jmcneill/netbsd/sdl/SDL-1.2.9nb2.tgz
My pkgsrc build tree (sorry for the mess, it's a WIP):
   http://www.invisible.ca/~jmcneill/netbsd/sdl/SDL-1.2.9nb2-wscons.tar.gz

To explicitly use the wscons driver, set the SDL_VIDEODRIVER environment 
variable to ``wscons''. To override the default device that the wscons 
driver opens for video (you shouldn't need to do this), set 
SDL_WSDISPLAYDEV.

There's still some work left to do though:
   1. Make it talk to wskbd/wsmouse.
   2. Add a wsdisplay ioctl to get the hw device's rgb mask.
   3. Support paletted colour modes (ie 8bpp).

Cheers,
Jared